Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

It was not in Audrey Noel to deny herself to any spirit
that was abroad; to repel was an art she did not practise.
But this night, though the Spirit of Peace hovered
so near, she did not seem to know it. Her hands
trembled, her cheeks were burning; her breast heaved,
and sighs fluttered from her lips, just parted.

CHAPTER V

Eustace Cardoc, Viscount Miltoun, had lived a very
lonely life, since he first began to understand the
peculiarities of existence. With the exception
of Clifton, his grandmother’s ‘majordomo,’
he made, as a small child, no intimate friend.
His nurses, governesses, tutors, by their own confession
did not understand him, finding that he took himself
with unnecessary seriousness; a little afraid, too,
of one whom they discovered to be capable of pushing
things to the point of enduring pain in silence.
Much of that early time was passed at Ravensham, for
he had always been Lady Casterley’s favourite
grandchild. She recognized in him the purposeful
austerity which had somehow been omitted from the
composition of her daughter. But only to Clifton,
then a man of fifty with a great gravity and long
black whiskers, did Eustace relieve his soul.
“I tell you this, Clifton,” he would say,
sitting on the sideboard, or the arm of the big chair
in Clifton’s room, or wandering amongst the
raspberries, “because you are my friend.”

And Clifton, with his head a little on one side, and
a sort of wise concern at his ‘friend’s’
confidences, which were sometimes of an embarrassing
description, would answer now and then: “Of
course, my lord,” but more often: “Of
course, my dear.”

There was in this friendship something fine and suitable,
neither of these ‘friends’ taking or suffering
liberties, and both being interested in pigeons, which
they would stand watching with a remarkable attention.

In course of time, following the tradition of his
family, Eustace went to Harrow. He was there
five years—­always one of those boys a little
out at wrists and ankles, who may be seen slouching,
solitary, along the pavement to their own haunts,
rather dusty, and with one shoulder slightly raised
above the other, from the habit of carrying something
beneath one arm. Saved from being thought a ‘smug,’
by his title, his lack of any conspicuous scholastic
ability, his obvious independence of what was thought
of him, and a sarcastic tongue, which no one was eager
to encounter, he remained the ugly duckling who refused
to paddle properly in the green ponds of Public School
tradition. He played games so badly that in
sheer self-defence his fellows permitted him to play
without them. Of ‘fives’ they made
an exception, for in this he attained much proficiency,
owing to a certain windmill-like quality of limb.
He was noted too for daring chemical experiments,
of which he usually had one or two brewing, surreptitiously
at first, and afterwards by special permission of
his house-master, on the principle that if a room must
smell, it had better smell openly. He made few
friendships, but these were lasting.